William Barclay famous quotes

There are two great days in a person's life - the day we are born and the day we discover why.
-- William Barclay

#Good Life #Two #Great Day

There is no joy in the world like the joy of bringing one soul to Christ.
-- William Barclay

#Joy #Soul #World

Prayer is not flight, prayer is power. Prayer does not deliver a man from some terrible situation; prayer enables a man to face and to master the situation.
-- William Barclay

#Prayer #Men #Faces

One of the highest of human duties is the duty of encouragement...It is easy to laugh at men's ideals; it is easy to pour cold water on their enthusiasm; it is easy to discourage others. The world is full of discouragers. We have a Christian duty to encourage one another. Many a time a word of praise or thanks or appreciation or cheer has kept a man on his feet. Blessed is the man who speaks such a word.
-- William Barclay

#Christian #Encouragement #Appreciation

We are trying not so much to make God listen to us as to make ourselves listen to him; we are trying not to persuade God to do what we want, but to find out what he wants us to do. It so often happens that in prayer we are really saying, 'Thy will be changed,' when we ought to be saying, 'Thy will be done.' The first object of prayer is not so much to speak to God as to listen to him.
-- William Barclay

#Prayer #Trying #Done

Jesus is the yes to every promise of God.
-- William Barclay

#Jesus #Promise

Love always involves responsibility, and love always involves sacrifice. And we do not really love Christ unless we are prepared to face His task and to take up His Cross.
-- William Barclay

#Easter #Responsibility #Sacrifice

I thank you for my friends, for those who understand me better than I understand myself. For those who know me at my worst, and still like me. For those who have forgiven me when I had no right to expect to be forgiven. Help me to be as true to my friends as I would wish them to be to me.
-- William Barclay

#Friendship #Wish #Helping

The tragedy of life and of the world is not that men do not know God; the tragedy is that, knowing Him, they still insist on going their own way.
-- William Barclay

#Men #Knowing #Tragedy

A man may well be condemned, not for doing something, but for doing nothing.
-- William Barclay

#Men #Doing Nothing #May

If we are to accept the teaching of Jesus at all, then the only test of the reality of a man's religion is his attitude to his fellow men. The only possible proof that a man loves God is the demonstrated fact that he loves his fellow men.
-- William Barclay

#Jesus #Attitude #Teaching

For the Christian, heaven is where Jesus is. We do not need to speculate on what heaven will be like. It is enough to know that we will be for ever with Him.
-- William Barclay

#Christian #Jesus #Heaven

The word grace emphasizes at one and the same time the helpless poverty of man and the limitless kindness of God.
-- William Barclay

#Spiritual #Kindness #Men

It may well be a sign of the decadence of the Church and the failure of Christianity that gifts have to be coaxed out of people, and that often they will not give at all unless they get something for their money in the way of entertainment or of goods. Giving which is real giving has a certain recklessness in it.
-- William Barclay

#Real #Giving #People

Prayer is not a way of making use of God; prayer is a way of offering ourselves to God in order that He should be able to make use of us.
-- William Barclay

#Prayer #Offering #Order

It is fatally easy to think of Christianity as something to be discussed and not as something to be experienced.
-- William Barclay

#Thinking #Christianity #Easy

Self-defense is a part of the law of nature; nor can it be denied the community, even against the king himself.
-- William Barclay

#Kings #Self #Law

Faith is not only a commitment to the promises of Christ; faith is also a commitment to the demands of Christ.
-- William Barclay

#Commitment #Promise #Demand

Jesus’ coming is the final and unanswerable proof that God cares.
-- William Barclay

#Jesus #Finals #Care

The Christian is a [person] of joy... A gloomy Christian is a contradiction of terms, and nothing in all religious history has done Christianity more harm than its connection with black clothes and long faces.
-- William Barclay

#Christian #Religious #Clothes

In the time we have it is surely our duty to do all the good we can to all the people we can in all the ways we can.
-- William Barclay

#Motivational #People #Way

Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory.
-- William Barclay

#Endurance #Bears #Glory

The awful importance of this life is that it determines eternity.
-- William Barclay

#Fear #Awful #Life Is

If a man fights his way through his doubts to the conviction that Jesus Christ is Lord, he has attained to a certainty that the man who unthinkingly accepts things can never reach.
-- William Barclay

#Jesus #Stars #Fighting

We will often find compensation if we think more of what life has given us and less about what life has taken away.
-- William Barclay

#Inspirational #Life #Taken

A man can be so busy making a living that he forgets to make a life.
-- William Barclay

#Inspirational Life #Men #Forget

If we find ourselves becoming critical of other people we should stop examining them, and start examining ourselves.
-- William Barclay

#People #Becoming #Should

The essential fact of Christianity is that God thought all men worth the sacrifice of his son.
-- William Barclay

#Sacrifice #Son #Men

God himself took this human flesh upon him.
-- William Barclay

#Flesh #Humans

Real repentance means that a man has come, not only to be sorry for the consequences of his sin, but to hate sin itself.
-- William Barclay

#Sorry #Hate #Real

When we love anyone with our whole hearts, life begins when we are with that person; it is only in their company that we are really and truly alive.
-- William Barclay

#Heart #Alive #Company

True worship is when the spirit, the immortal and invisible part of man, speaks to and meets with God, who is immortal and invisible.
-- William Barclay

#Men #Spirit #Worship

There is a time when to avoid trouble is to store up trouble, and when to seek for a lazy and a cowardly peace is to court a still greater danger.
-- William Barclay

#Lazy #Trouble #Danger

The true, the genuine worship is when man, through his spirit, attains to friendship and intimacy with God. True and genuine worship is not to come to a certain place; it is not to go through a certain ritual or liturgy; it is not even to bring certain gifts. True worship is when the spirit, the immortal and invisible part of man, speaks to and meets with God, who is immortal and invisible.
-- William Barclay

#Men #Spirit #Worship

The greatest thing is a life of obedience in the routine things of everyday life. No amount of fine feeling can take the place of faithful doing.
-- William Barclay

#Life #Feelings #Faithful

It is the simple truth to say that the New Testament books became canonical because no one could stop them doing so.
-- William Barclay

#Book #Simple #New Testament

Religion fails if it cannot speak to men as they are.
-- William Barclay

#Men #Speak #Failing

We reverence God and we hallow God's name when our life is such that it brings honor to God and attracts others to Him.
-- William Barclay

#Christian #Names #Honor

When we accept Christ we enter into three new relationships: (1) We enter into a new relationship with God. The judge becomes the father; the distant becomes the near; strangeness becomes intimacy and fear becomes love. (2) We enter into a new relationship with our fellow men. Hatred becomes love; selfishness becomes service; and bitterness becomes forgiveness. (3) We enter into a new relationship with ourselves. Weakness becomes strength; frustration becomes achievement; and tension becomes peace.
-- William Barclay

#Spiritual #Father #New Relationship

When we believe that God is Father, we also believe that such a father's hand will never cause his child a needless tear. We may not understand life any better, but we will not resent life any longer.
-- William Barclay

#Children #Father #Believe

We have a duty to encourage one another. Many a time a word of praise or thanks or appreciation or cheer has kept a man on his feet. Blessed is the man who speaks such a word.
-- William Barclay

#Appreciation #Cheer #Blessed

Pride is the ground in which all the other sins grow, and the parent from which all the other sins come.
-- William Barclay

#Christian #Pride #Parent

But the best definition of it is to say that heaven is that state where we will always be with Jesus, and where nothing will separate us from Him any more
-- William Barclay

#Jesus #Heaven #Definitions

...for Paul faith is always faith in a person. Faith is not the intellectual acceptance of a body of doctrine; faith is faith in a person.
-- William Barclay

#Faith #Acceptance #Intellectual

Prayer will never do our work for us; what it will do is to strengthen us for work which must be done.
-- William Barclay

#Prayer #Done

It may well be that the world is denied miracle after miracle and triumph after triumph because we will not bring to Christ what we have and what we are. If, just as we are, we would lay ourselves on the altar of service of Jesus Christ, there is no saying what Christ could do with us and through us.
-- William Barclay

#Jesus #Miracle #World

We may not understand how the spirit works; but the effect of the spirit on the lives of men is there for all to see; and the only unanswerable argument for Christianity is a Christian life. No man can disregard a religion and a faith and a power which is able to make bad men good. . .
-- William Barclay

#Christian #Men #May

More people have been brought into the church by the kindness of real Christian love than by all the theological arguments in the world.
-- William Barclay

#Christian #Kindness #Real

The danger of prosperity is that it encourages a false independence.
-- William Barclay

#Independence #Prosperity #Danger

Christian freedom does not mean being free to do as we like; it means being free to do as we ought.
-- William Barclay

#Christian #Mean #Being Free

It may be that one of our great faults in prayer is that we talk too much and listen too little. When prayer is at its highest we wait in silence for God's voice to us; we linger in His presence for His peace and His power to flow over us and around us; we lean back in His everlasting arms and feel the serenity of perfect security in Him.
-- William Barclay

#Christian #Prayer #Voice

Christianity is unquestionably a personal experience. It is also unquestionably not a private experience.
-- William Barclay

#Christianity

Christianity does not think of man finally submitting to the power of God, it thinks of Him as finally surrendering to the love of God. It is not that man's will is crushed, but that man's heart is broken.
-- William Barclay

#Inspirational #Heart #Men

So often we have a kind of vague, wistful longing that the promises of Jesus should be true. The only way really to enter into them is to believe them with the clutching intensity of a drowning man.
-- William Barclay

#Jesus #Believe #Men

So long as we judge ourselves by human comparisons, there is plenty of room for self-satisfaction, and self-satisfaction kills faith, for faith is born of the sense of need. But when we compare ourselves with Jesus Christ, and through Him, with God, we are humbled to the dust, and then faith is born, for there is nothing left to do but to trust to the mercy of God.
-- William Barclay

#Jesus #Self #Dust

Instead of our petulant, fretful, irritable human hastiness we should cultivate in our souls the patience which has learned to wait on God.
-- William Barclay

#Waiting #Soul #Should

Here is an eternal truth. Life cannot be divided into compartments in some which God is involved and in others of which he is not involved... The fact is that God does not need to be invited into certain departments of life, and kept out of others. He is everywhere, all through life and in every activity of life. He hears not only the words that are spoken in his name; he hears all words; and there cannot be any such thing as a form of words which evades bringing God into any transaction. We will regard all promises as sacred if we remember that all promises are made in the presence of God.
-- William Barclay

#Names #Promise #Needs